Editorial: Federal poultry rules need to be humane

Most Americans don't think very often about where their food comes from, or what work took place to prepare it for them.

When it comes to our meats, that work can often seem barbaric.

Modern agribusiness tries to handle the killing of animals and processing of beef, pork and poultry products with speed and as humanely as possible. Indeed, Colorado State University professor Temple Grandin has been credited with helping the beef industry process cows more humanely and more quickly.

But a recent report from the Washington Post, which looked at U.S. Department of Agriculture records, says nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses.

The Post reported that fast-moving lines can fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into scalding water.

Employees are supposed to flip the birds upside-down and shackle their legs before an automated blade cuts off the birds' heads. They are then dunked into scalding water to help remove feathers.

If their heads miss the blades while the line is moving too quickly, they are dipped in the water alive and boiled to death.

Poultry plants can't sell those chickens and turkeys, which inspectors can easily spot because their skin becomes reddened by the boiling.

An average of 825,000 chickens and 18,000 turkeys a year have died that way in recent years, about 1 percent of total production, according to USDA reports.

The process is horrific and results in the loss of sellable product, so it would be reasonable to expect that plants would want to improve.

But now the U.S. Department of Agriculture is finalizing a proposal that would let the lines move even faster, from 140 chickens per minute to 175, and from 45 turkeys per minute to 55. The proposal also would let 40 percent of government inspectors be replaced by poultry plant employees.

Many fear it also will increase cases of inhumane deaths.

Americans want their poultry to come to stores reasonably priced and uncontaminated.

The challenge for plants should not be just to find ways to speed up the processing, they should be asked to find ways to process poultry quickly while minimizing the ghastly deaths to which some of these birds have been subject.

If new government rules focus only on new ways to speed up the process, more birds will be tortured. And that should be distasteful to every consumer.